Why “Green” Consumer Choices Aren’t Enough

Middle-class people are often socialized to believe they are responsible for improving their neighborhoods, their communities, and the world itself. Helpful as that often is, it creates a blind spot when it comes to global warming.

With his July Rolling Stonearticle,
Bill McKibben attracted enormous attention for his proposal to step up
the fight against the fossil-fuels industry in the struggle to forestall
global warming. To identify a clear opponent and mobilize power against
it is, of course, a strategy of polarization. McKibben has been getting
some thoughtful pushback, and I’d like to respond to one of the
objections I’ve heard: that polarizing in this way distorts the truth,
since carbon pollution is driven by millions of consumer choices. We’re
all responsible for the fix we’re in, some critics say, so it’s wrong to
mobilize against the 1 percent.

I’d like to challenge this objection on three grounds: it misreads
power, privileges one way of seeking truth, and snuggles into a
middle-class comfort zone.

When it comes to energy policy, power is
not evenly distributed. An individual consumer’s choice to purchase a
car instead of a bike is nothing like an individual CEO’s choice to blow
up a mountaintop in order to mine coal. It could become trendy to eat
local food—it already has, thank goodness—but an individual’s
decision to buy at the farmers market and a bank’s decision to fund
windmills instead of coal mining are not at all comparable in terms of
their leverage or effect.

Responsibility should be assigned according to degree of power in
decision-making, and when it comes to energy, it’s clear who in the U.S.
is most influential in the biggest decisions. Why not hold the 1
percent accountable for the enormous power that they now have—and
which they fight to retain?

A more accurate picture

I agree that a polarizing campaign against “the baddies” doesn’t
represent a complicated and nuanced account of all the truth about what
drives climate change. But just about any given campaign’s start-up
picture inevitably leaves out a lot.

Billionaire Warren E. Buffett put it clearly in his interview with The New York Times: “There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”

An academic might prefer to start with the most complicated version
of the truth possible. That’s an academic’s job, after all: the pursuit
of nuance. It’s a mistake, however, for McKibben’s scholarly critics to
take an intellectual procedure and apply it outside the theory seminar.
Starting with the complicated version doesn’t line up with how people
actually learn, either as individuals or as a body politic.

Harvard professor George C. Homans has pointed out
that people usually build their cognitive maps through successive
approximations. We get a rough image of something (the earth is flat),
and as we address it more carefully, we get more clarity (it’s round). Then still more observation yields nuance (it’s actually oval).

People generally get a fuller understanding of reality through
successive approximations. So do societies and the social movements that
lead them in the direction of more complicated truths. (For a fuller
explanation of this pedagogical view, see my book, Facilitating Group Learning.)

Mohandas Gandhi rooted his work in the value of satya
(truth), and at the same time led polarizing campaigns. Looking back, we
can see that his work was in alignment with how most people actually
learn. By the end of the Salt Satyagraha, both the Indians and the British knew far more about imperialism than either had known in the beginning.

Gandhi found social conflict a powerful means of learning, especially when views of truth are in dispute. In her book Conquest of Violence,
Joan V. Bondurant argues this to be Gandhi’s great contribution to
political philosophy: fierce contention can be a valuable means of
discovering truth.

Contention might sometimes even be superior to purely intellectual
inquiry. When I started to study sociology, for instance, I judged the
field to be largely innocent of what was going on in U.S. race
relations; its picture of reality was seriously “off,” along with the
pictures of race held by most of society.

Then the civil rights movement unfolded,
the country polarized, and intellectuals learned from what was
happening. Not only did much of the United States wake up, but academics
did as well.

What does this have to do with social class?

I’ve found it useful to think of each social class as having its own
culture: a set of norms and attitudes that back up the skills that class
members need to perform their role in the larger economy.

Be warned: just like when we identify a culture with a place or
nation, when we say that a class has a culture we make generalizations
that have many exceptions. It’s best to use generalizations cautiously.
The point is simply to throw enough light on class to see some
differences among classes, to make it easier to use the strengths that
show up, and to become aware of weaknesses.

The middle class is socialized to remain confused
about power. That’s how middle-class people can create narratives that
ignore class struggle and assign the primary responsibility to—in the
case of energy policy—consumers.

Middle-class people, for example, contribute to social change in many
ways. They are usually socialized to believe that they as individuals
can make a difference in their neighborhoods, cities, and even the larger
world. They often bring a sense of political optimism that helps a
campaign get started. They bring other gifts, but like any class they
also bring blind spots.

The point of class awareness for social changers is to become alert
to areas where their own thinking may be clouded by their class
training.

In both the owning class and the working class, there is wide
understanding that economic power is a decisive force in society.
Billionaire Warren E. Buffett put it clearly in his interview with The New York Times: “There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”

The perch of the middle class is different; in the middle, it can be harder to see what’s going on. The Times’s
middle-class readers, who read Buffett’s quote in 2006, did not erupt.
They seem to have read Buffett with glazed eyes, unable to process the
information.

There’s a reason. The middle class is socialized to remain confused
about power. That’s how middle-class people can create narratives that
ignore class struggle and assign the primary responsibility to—in the
case of energy policy—consumers. The amount of privilege and the
appearance of power given to middle-class individuals make them
especially prone to versions of “blame the victim.”

In my graduate-school days, the leading sociological image of U.S.
society was “consensus.” I believe it was their middle-classness that
prevented social scientists from seeing the fundamentals in U.S. race
relations prior to the civil rights movement—again, a failure of power
analysis.

The very awareness of discomfort when reading McKibben’s proposal
could be, for many readers, a reason to support him. Outside our comfort
zone is where learning happens.

These blind spots are not unusual in the middle class. Another of the
narratives has been that the unemployed could be working if they would
stay in high school or complete job training programs. But working-class
people recognize that’s a physical impossibility. The jobs don’t exist.
The leadership of the U.S. economy exports millions of jobs. It’s the 1
percent that decides the number of jobs available, not high school
drop-outs!

When middle-class people become aware enough to question their own
favorite narratives, their educational attainment becomes a greater
resource for social change. The gifts that go with the middle class role
are enormously valuable to social change; the problem for any class
comes when it forgets humility and believes that its class perspective
is The One That Counts.

So, how can members of any class check themselves? They can start by
asking themselves whether they are operating inside their comfort zones.
If the answer is “yes,” their perspective might not be appropriate,
since working for radical change (such as truly sustainable energy
policy) cannot be done from inside our comfort zones.

The very awareness of discomfort when reading McKibben’s proposal
could be, for many readers, a reason to support him. Outside our comfort
zone is where learning happens. Outside our comfort zone is where we’ll
save the planet and ourselves.

This article was originally posted on

Interested?

Bill McKibben used to think that lack of action to stabilize the climate
came from widespread apathy, denial, or comfort with the status quo.
Here’s what made him change his mind.

Bill McKibben imagines himself in the year 2100, looking back at a
century of climate chaos and asking: What did it take to save the world?

Bill McKibben: In the mighty struggles beginning between climate
activists and the fossil fuel industry, geography is on our side.

George Lakey is the director of Training for Change.
He has led 1,500 workshops and activist projects on the local, national
and international levels. He has written several articles and books on
strategizing for activism, including Grassroots and Nonprofit
Leadership: A Guide for Organizations in Changing Times. Currently,
Lakey is a Lang Research Fellow and Visiting Professor at Swarthmore
College.